Mousesports’ new CS:GO roster looks promising

It’s been two months since mousesports revamped its CS:GO roster with the additions of in-game leader Finn “karrigan” Andersen, Turkish star Özgür “woxic” Eker, and newcomer David “frozen” Čerňanský.

All of them have already found synergy alongside Robin “ropz” Kool and Chris “chrisJ” de Jong. Mousesports won their first tournament this week at DreamHack Open Tours. It wasn’t the biggest event, but they faced good opponents like Windigo, AVANGAR, and Valiance. And they convincingly beat them.

Some maps were fairly one-sided, including a 16-6 win against Windigo on Nuke, and 16-8 and 16-7 victories against AVANGAR on Overpass and Nuke. The grand finals against Valiance went smoothly for mousesports, too. Ropz, frozen, and woxic combined for 136 kills in the two maps played and carried mousesports to their first title with this lineup.

Mousesports played well before at ESL Pro League season nine when they secured a spot in the finals during the first stage of the European league. Ropz and woxic are among the best players at the entire competition with 1.30 and 1.28 ratings, respectively.

But at their first big event, IEM Sydney in early May, mousesports’ games were average. They defeated BOOT-d[S], BIG (who were playing with a stand-in), and Renegades in best-of-three series before losing to MIBR, a top five team in the world.

For now, karrigan is doing what he’s best at: making sure that all the players are comfortable in his system to help stars like ropz and woxic shine. This could be karrigan’s honeymoon period, though.

Usually, when the Danish captain joins a team, he fixes the gameplan and all players start performing better. It went that way while he was leading TSM, Astralis from 2015 to 2016, and when he played for FaZe over the last two years.

But both Astralis and FaZe eventually lost faith in karrigan’s in-game leader qualities. The Danes changed for the better when they added Lukas “gla1ve” Rossander and FaZe struggled under the leadership of their star Nikola “NiKo” Kovač (they added Filip “NEO” Kubski last week to fix these issues).

Mousesports’ old lineup didn’t live up to its full potential, winning only two big events: StarSeries i-League season four in February 2018 and ESL One New York in September 2018. They were even called “budget FaZe” because mousesports had the pieces, but not the titles like FaZe.

It’s still too soon to say that the new mousesports are a top team. But this roster looks promising since they have the firepower and structure needed to succeed. Mousesports will have to prove themselves at the next big event, the finals of ESL Pro League season nine in June.